Some time ago, up cropped Galaxy Zoo, a crowd sourced effort to classify galaxies in Hubble image data. Get shown an image of a galaxy, select what type it is, what it looks like, if there is anything odd about it etc, submit your results. Hundreds of people classifying the same image leads to a collective set of results for what we're looking at, and in turn even allows the team behind Galaxy Zoo to study human behaviour in this type of task. And can lead to chance discoveries like Hanny's Voorwerp.
Fast forward X number of years and the project has expanded into a plethora of subject areas (Zooniverse is the overarching site listing them all) including hunting for supernova, mapping the Moon and the Milky Way and more.
I touched upon one of them in amongst Nibiru Nonsense, that of Solar Stormwatch, where you can view data from the STEREO satellites looking for, as the name suggests, Solar Storms. It even gives you a quick calculation on how fast any ejection you see was traveling, and when and if it would have hit Earth. It's learning while doing, and by doing I actually mean helping out science.
So now the point of the thread. I got an email alert today of the next project, Planet Hunters. Take data from Kepler showing dips in light from a star, ask the good ol' public to mark where the dips occur, and hey presto you're on the way to finding an extrasolar planet, all from the comfort of your armchair.
In every case, you sit a quick tutorial teaching you everything you need to know, and you're on your way, you're doing science. Your contributions count towards discovery, they count towards knowledge. You are able to see data direct from these marvelous missions, and be in a position to hop into a forum and ask questions or discuss your findings with experts…
… and yet people prefer to make up stories about how footage was leaked, or how something is exploding. Welcome to Humankind.
I don't expect everyone to drop what they're doing and participate, course not. Heck, I'm not exactly an avid participant myself, but if you haven't heard of them, check them out. It's not boring old interfaces from the 90s, this is proper Web 2.01, fancy graphics, have some fun while working kinda interfaces.
You never know, you might be credited with a discovery or two, in between emailing a Lolcat and waiting for crops to grow in Farmvile2